From humble beginnings, Paul Guillaume
(1891–1934) rose to become one of the leading cultural players and art
dealer-collectors of Paris in the early twentieth century. Guillaume
died at the age of forty-two, by which time he had amassed an
outstanding private collection of works by leading modernists. Unlike
many art collectors of the time, Guillaume did not come from a wealthy
and cultivated background, nor was he only interested in simply
supplying works of art for customer demand like other art dealers. He
also actively promoted certain aspects of the artistic and cultural
life of Paris, providing moral and material support to artists, and
interpreting the art of his time for his contemporaries. This approach,
while not uncommon today, was innovative at the time and had previously
been attempted by only a few courageous dealer-collectors in Paris,
such as Paul Durand-Ruel and Ambroise Vollard. Guillaume was celebrated
by the artists whom he supported; for instance in Modigliani's portrait
the words Novo Pilota, or ‘new helmsman’, identify the sitter as being
at the forefront of modern art.
Guillaume's
premature death prevented his dream – of transforming his private
collection to a museum of modern art – from being realised. After his
death Domenica, his widow and heir, remarried and modified the existing
collection, selling some of the more extreme avant-garde works (and
later his collection of African art and modern sculpture) and acquiring
works of a more conservative character. Domenica's concern to promote
harmony among the works in the Guillaume collection made her edited
version of the collection all the more typically a capsule of Parisian
taste in the 1920s. Before he died, Paul Guillaume had resolved to give
his collection to the Louvre. Domenica, a lover of Impressionist art
(Monet's Argenteuil 1875 was one of her last acquisitions), sought to
intertwine her late husband's philanthropic impulses with her own.
After much negotiation, the French state acquired the collection in two
consignments in 1959 and 1963 and housed it in the refurbished Musée de
l'Orangerie in Paris, which was at the time attached to the Louvre for
administrative purposes. The Orangerie now housed not only Monet's
major Water Lilies cycle of paintings, but also the magnificent
collection bearing the names of Domenica's two husbands, Jean Walter
and Paul Guillaume. The collection has been on permanent display since
1984.
african art / art africain /
primitive art / art primitif / arts premiers / art gallery / art tribal
/ tribal art / l'oeil et la main / galerie d'art premier / Agalom /
Armand Auxiètre / www.african-paris.com / www.agalom.com
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